It sounds like you've already made your mind up. You want to pursue the arts, and are going to try and do that. By all means, you're young. Life is short. T

It sounds like you've already made your mind up. You want to pursue the arts, and are going to try and do that. By all means, you're young. Life is short. There are many of us that tried to make a go of it in the arts scene, but ended up going in to technical fields. I think that there is a correlation. I've had a day job as an ER nurse for 15 years. I knew it was not what I wanted to do for a living, but it paid the bills. I, too thought that vocational happiness was to be found pursuing the arts, so, I studied art formally and on my own in a lot of different forms: interior design, sculpture, painting, photography, computer graphics, video editing, animation, 3D modeling and animation. Any one of those things can be done to pay the bills, and there are career paths for each one of those. But, at some point, I found that I had to trade my passion to someone else for cash. And, doing that was impossible for me. I wasn't able to stay sane and edit the industrial video about the history of SmallCo's dialysis machines. I wasn't willing to create the logo like the client wanted, because I knew that what the client wanted was aesthetically wrong and ugly. I wasn't willing to put in 16 hours x 6 days a weeks just to be a visual effects artist in Hollywood. It's one of the reasons that Hackers and Painters made so much sense to me. There is a creativity in programming, and in hacking that is very close to the creativity that one gets while painting or sculpting. Especially when the hacking is done on your own business. It's the reason that I'm not going to work for someone else as a programmer, too. Why should I create value for someone else, when I can create value for myself? Why should I spend 8-10 hours a day at a desk so someone else's company can increase in value, when I can spend 8-10 hours a day on my own company making something that people want. As an entrepreneur, I get the creative control. I get to be the decider. I set my own hours. I financially benefit from my own work. And, I get to do a bunch of different things. That's why I'm going to be a founder instead of an artist. It's a lot of the same benefits and risks, and a lot greater upside. At the same time, had I never knocked on the arts door, I would have never ended up being an entrepreneur.